In an effort to develop a panel of carbohydrate specific reagents and techniques for their use in the structural and topographical analysis of cell surface carbohydrate components, we propose to purify six plant lectins, analyze their chemical homogeneity and saccharide binding properties, fluorescent and radiochemically labeled lectin derivatives, and employ the native, fluorescent and radioactive proteins in agglutination, fluorescence microscopy and quantitative binding assays with murine fibroblasts and SV40 and MSV infected cells. To adequately detect differences in and to sequence the primary structure of the cell surface saccharides of these cell types studies will be undertaken to examine the interaction of the lectins and lectin derivatives with cells perturbed by changes in temperature and pH as well as with cells treated with glycoside hydrolases and proteases in order to perform controlled stepwise degradation of the carbohydrate structures. It is expected that these studies on cultured normal and transformed cells employing a series of native, fluorescent, and radioactively tagged lectins of differing specificites will produce results which will lead to: methods for the identification and structural elucidation of tumor associated carbohydrate cell surface structures which may allow the synthesis of artificial tumor associated antigens for employment in immunotherapy, an immunodiagnostic test employing lectins for the detection of tumor associated cell surface structures, the relationship of the topographical distribution of different cell surface carbohydrates containing structures of normal and transformed cells which may be related to altered immunogenicity due to transformation, elucidation of changes in carbohydrate containing cell surface material which may be related to alterations in the cellular metabolism of cells transformed by oncogenic viruses, information relating the nature of cell membrane alterations with respect to RNA and DNA viral infection of cells, and a better understanding of the relationship of the fluidity of animal cell membranes to their function and to intracellular communication.